The model cameo isn't exactly a new phenomenon in Hollywood; like Kate Upton in The Other Woman or Cindy Crawford in Fair Game before her, there are countless catwalkers who have made the crossover from the runway to the silver screen. More often than not though, their role is to be seen and not heard. Not so for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who holds her own among names like Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Along with models Abbey Lee, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, and actress Courtney Eaton, Huntington-Whiteley plays one of the Five Wives of the post-apocalyptic warlord, Immortan Joe. But there is one quality that sets her apart from the crowd of ethereal wives: her character, The Splendid Angharad, is heavily pregnant. In fact she wears a prosthetic stomach throughout the film. “Incredible effort was made to make the stomach seem as real as possible—every single one of my freckles was put on the stomach. It was really interesting taking it off and putting it on in the morning,” says Huntington-Whiteley, who cut her teeth carrying Victoria's Secret Angel wings on her back. “It changed the way I walked, the way I sat down. My back was hurt by the end of the day and I would eat my lunch off the top of my belly!”

The physical transformation wasn’t just a showboat gimmick, either. The 28-year-old Brit went through three weeks of training with Eve Ensler, the creator of The Vagina Monologues, to get under the skin of her character. “She [Ensler] spent a week with us, giving us real insight to what it might have been like to have lived under the thumb of a warlord. She had spent extensive time with women who have had the most tragic stories that I’ve ever heard of: These women have been completely traumatized and abused by men,” she says. “I mean, my character is pregnant and has obviously been raped by this man. You have these five women who are Immortan Joe’s commodity.” But Huntington-Whiteley proves that she just isn’t another commodity, and Splendid bravely fights to the death to escape her past life, not just for herself but for others too. It’s a far cry from the damsel-in-distress role she played in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, her blockbuster debut. This time around, she’s in charge of saving herself. "This film is about gender equality and women finding their strengths,” she says. "And it’s cool to be able to represent that in some way especially in an action movie."